Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,520 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8,697 out of 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Monsoon
    Laden with bittersweet sentiment, the film packs a muted but lasting emotional wallop.
  2. Divine Love
    With sci-fi touches and sanctimonious eroticism, the incisive satire intently takes on the influence of evangelical Christianity on the state — namely the far-right movement that elected populist Jair Bolsonaro.
  3. Fatman
    Fatman isn’t a lump of coal. More like a fruitcake your neighbor dropped off in early December that’s left on the counter through the new year, its red and green cherries hardening into buckshot before being hauled out to the curb with the Christmas tree.
  4. The Life Ahead
    With every line and look, Loren both reminds us of her legacy playing tenacious women and paints Rosa’s distinctive fire and grief like an artisan. It’s a compact master class in the movie star’s craft: exquisitely tailored glamour and deft characterization working seamlessly in tandem.
  5. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    Fascinating stuff is at play here amid the heady theorizing and arcane references (panspermia, anyone?). But it’s blunted by Herzog’s clipped, Bavarian-tinged narration that’s by turns logy, deadpan and florid. Maybe his trademark voice-overs have simply worked better in the past.
  6. Dating Amber
    Not all of the ancillary characters and their stories are fully developed in the film’s quick 92 minutes, but Dating Amber convincingly channels the angst and awkwardness that can be a part of teenagers’ struggles with their identity.
  7. Dirty God
    Polak’s film is an unflinching exploration of beauty, identity, sex and self in the wake of a life-changing event.
  8. The Climb
    A masterpiece of bromantic woes, the movie subdues toxic masculinity and makes a case for men’s often dismissed necessity for platonic companionship.
  9. Dreamland
    The new Margot Robbie vehicle Dreamland seems to be about legends, the price of escape, maybe unreliable narrators — but ends up not saying much about any of them.
  10. Come Away
    The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”
  11. Freaky
    Freaky has a lighthearted tone and a bouncy energy that keeps it watchable, even though writer-director Christopher Landon and his co-writer, Michael Kennedy, don’t do as much as they should have with a killer idea.
    • Los Angeles Times
      • Posted Nov 10, 2020
  12. Recon
    If tension was the filmmakers’ aim, they decisively miss — especially if it was meant to come from the puzzlingly casual sniper situation. Any possibility of buying into the story’s reality is defused by the soldiers being so dang gabby, and loudly so.
  13. Make Up
    It’s an insightful, deeply felt film that lets us in on a personal evolution.
  14. Hillbilly Elegy
    Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.
  15. Mank
    Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.
  16. Koko-di Koko-da
    The film mixes horror elements with surreal fantasy and the crushing realism of a serious family drama. It’s metaphorical, vague but also precise in its specificity for the horrific trials these people are to face — their personal hell.
  17. Proxima
    Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.
  18. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    Writer-director David E. Talbert’s marvelous, groundbreaking musical-fantasy Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey stands to join the ranks of holiday movie classics. Smartly conceived, lovingly mounted and beautifully performed, this Victorian era-set extravaganza nearly sings out to be enjoyed as a communal, big-screen experience.
  19. Kindred
    In the end, what we’re left with is an exceptionally well-acted motion picture that mostly fails to move.
  20. Fire Will Come
    Fire Will Come is a pithy and devastating masterstroke from an auteur astute in his calibration of subdued emotional impact. Its discourse on forgiveness simmers in one’s mind inextinguishably.
  21. The Dark and the Wicked
    It isn’t exactly terrifying, but is well-acted and sinister enough to rise (levitate ominously?) above the pack.
  22. Jungleland
    This dire and dreamy road movie is impressive work from director and co-writer Winkler (he co-wrote with Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith).
  23. The Informer
    The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.
  24. Let Him Go
    In many ways, it feels like the midcentury pulp thrillers it emulates: well-plotted and grisly, but almost ephemeral. It is Lane’s performance that lingers, one that dares to be uniquely hopeful about the future, and letting the old ways die.
  25. The Donut King
    The filmmaker deftly moves backward and forward in time to chronicle Ngoy’s remarkable journey from war-torn Cambodia to the strip malls of Orange County while becoming a multimillionaire.
  26. Us Kids
    For its merits as a dynamic nonfiction piece incisively dealing with a pivotal issue from heartbreakingly human angle, Us Kids is indispensable viewing for anyone who genuinely cares about the future of this country beyond “thoughts and prayers.”
  27. His House
    A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.
  28. Come Play
    The story is deceptively simple. However, built around a universal quandary of our tech-obsessed modern world, underpinned with a folkloric tale that appeals to our most primal child selves — yearning for acceptance and connection — it has a heavy metaphorical resonance.
  29. The True Adventures of Wolfboy
    “Wolfboy” is a compassionate film with some insight into being different and into the destructiveness of letting the world’s unkindness shape one’s self view.
  30. Spell
    If scares are the movie’s raison d’etre, though, it’s hard to imagine Spell will frighten anyone but those vulnerable to a few bits of graphic gore.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »